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NOISY MODERNISTS:
THE SOUND OF NARRATIVE EXPERIMENTATION
by
Mariko Dawson Zare
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Mariko Dawson Zare

Through innovative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, modernist writers created amorphous interior narratives in an attempt to delve beneath the surface of the individual subject. This is not to say that the focus on inner thoughts results in silent novels. Rather sound becomes both a part of the exterior sonic environment as well as the interior world of individual subjects. The boundaries between internal and external soundscapes are repeatedly and constantly permeated as sounds mingle, merge and disperse between, through and within bodies and consciousness. Modernist subjects engage with these flowing sounds, becoming participants in the soundscape as actors who create, as well as conduits or recipients of sound. I propose reconfiguring these novels as sound objects themselves, thereby placing modernist novels within a soundscape that includes the reader through a sonic engagement with the texts. Experiments with aurality within modernist narratives operate not only diegetically, but also infiltrate the reader’s existing sound world. ❧ Tracing the literary roots of these trends in narrative experimentation reveals the extent to which modernist writers pursued new ways of experimenting with sound and consciousness. In this introduction, I will be relying on two such precursors—Charlotte Brontë and Dorothy Richardson—to draw some provisional distinctions before moving, in the next two chapters, to examine the aural dimensions and soundscapes incorporated into the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Bronte’s representations of sound in Jane Eyre are a product of the Victorian period in which her novel was written, but also anticipate the innovations to be found in the following century. Dorothy Richardson’s twelve volume novel series, Pilgrimage, was the first to be associated with the term which is so closely identified with modernism—“stream of consciousness”—and also makes sound a central aspect of its impressionistic narrative, presaging later modernist interventions. ❧ In my first chapter I will explore Joyce’s use of sound in “Sirens” not only as an aspect of material information, but also as he experiments with techniques to evoke aural simultaneity, and a soundscape auscultated through Bloom’s consciousness. As a result, sound both orients Bloom as the center of the novel, but disorients the reader, whose perception of Bloom’s external sound environment becomes dislocated from the originating sound objects, because the reader accesses it through the associations that occur within Bloom’s consciousness. ❧ In Woolf’s The Waves sounds are also expressed as an aspect of the consciousness of the protagonists. While meeting with all the protagonists of the novel for a dinner party, Bernard hears “cars rush past this restaurant; now and then, down the river, a siren hoots, as a steamer makes for the sea” (182). The jingle in Pilgrimage is described as heard through Miriam’s interior stream of consciousness, while the sirens in The Waves are made audible not only as sound waves heard through Bernard’s consciousness, but also made linguistically audible through his spoken soliloquy. It does not, however, occur as an external sound object, such as the Boylan’s jingle. The only way we know about the siren is through a process of Bernard’s perception. As chapter two will show, the narrative in The Waves is seemingly devoid of a physical environment—except for the six characters’ voices, which exist in a sort of soundscape of emptiness. Any external sounds are made real only as aspects of their consciousnesses. As their external contexts recede, their thoughts are textually rendered into sound, but the act of diegetic listening is only barely implied. ❧ As the readers, and therefore, “listeners” of texts as sound objects, we are invited into the creative process. As objective narratives become increasingly abstract, or indeed even fade away altogether, the modernist soundscape is less restricted simply by sound acts within the action of the novel, and extends beyond the page to construct the novel as a sound object, entering the auditory consciousness of the reader. The entire reading experience becomes the soundscape.

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NOISY MODERNISTS:
THE SOUND OF NARRATIVE EXPERIMENTATION
by
Mariko Dawson Zare
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Mariko Dawson Zare